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IBM Edge Based temporarily at the Mandelay Bay hotel on the Las Vegas strip for its Edge conference, Big Blue has blasted out a set of storage announcements. IBM appears to be taking its shot at the ever-expanding storage market as the Big Data era begins in earnest.

At the event, IBM rolled out its TMS acquisition-based FlashSystem appliances. The models include:

720 with up to 12.4TB of fast SLC flash,

820 with up to 24.7TB of slower and less expensive eMLC flash,

710 with up to 6.9TB of SLC flash,

810 with up to 13.7TB of eMLC flash.

Essentially these are re-branded TMS RamSan boxes. For example, the RamSan 820.

Big Blue also announced:

It has added 4TB hard disk drive support to its Storwize V7000 and XIV Storage arrays, increasing capacity from the previous highest capacity drives supported which stored 3TB.

Easy Tier automated data placement inside IBM arrays was extended to put the most-frequently accessed data in the EXP30 Ultra SSD I/O Drawer in conjunction with the DS8870 Storage System, this Easy Tier Server capability "can help boost storage performance by up to five times."

A new enterprise edition of LTFS, the Linear Tape File System, was integrated with thje GPFS filesystem enabling GPFS users to treat tape as storage tier for archival-class data and so lower its storage cost by, IBM says, up to 90 per cent.

There is a new management dashboard for the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Operations Center product enabling users to "manage more backups with less complexity."

IBM wrapped these things in a "Software-Defined Environment" wrapper, which is now part of its Smarter Computing marketing initiative. There's also a Big Data angle, with users able to get insights into and access to their data faster, according to IBM. ®